Found this interesting article today, and I thought that you all might enjoy it. Let me know what you all think:)

I'm a bit confused--I didn't think there were witnesses who could give a physical description of the killer. I thought that was a big chunk of the mystery, that nobody knew what he looked like and therefore police would have been hard pressed to search for anyone based on appearance.

And I definitely never pictured Jack the Ripper as a middle-aged Mexican dude.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - An eminent South African historian believes he has stumbled on the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Charles van Onselen said at first he wasn't sure he wanted to publicize the conclusions he drew when he noticed parallels in the century-old, unsolved Ripper case and the background of Joseph Silver, who terrorized women as "King of the Pimps" in Johannesburg.

"I was left with a choice: I have got intelligent speculation, which I think is pretty long way down the track to proving that this guy was the Ripper. Do I include or exclude it?

"If I include it, it buggers up the book and people get excited for the wrong reasons. If I exclude it and a really sharp professional spots it ... I had to explore this possibility," he said, sitting in his tree-filled garden, about 3 miles from where Silver reigned, in a city still regarded as one of the most crime-ridden in the world.

The publicity around van Onselen's "The Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath", published in April, has made much of Silver being Jack the Ripper, the notorious Victorian serial killer who murdered at least five East London prostitutes in 1888.

But van Onselen, an acclaimed biographer who specializes in South Africa's criminal history and who took nearly three decades to research the book, only makes his Ripper case in the final 25th chapter, written in the last 36 months.

While the book has been well-received, reaction from "Ripperologists" has been skeptical as van Onselen makes his case on circumstantial evidence.

To his doubters the author said: "How many coincidences do you want to mount up in your mind simultaneously until you start saying this is a real possibility?"

Scores of people have been accused of the Ripper murders, but no one has ever been proven guilty and London police put the number of most likely suspects at just four, among them a poor Whitechapel resident named Kosminski who, like Silver, was a Polish Jew. At the time, Londoners speculated the killer was Jewish, leading to fears of an anti-Jewish backlash.

Van Onselen believes Silver fits the psychological profile of the Whitechapel murderer and he places his subject at the center of the scene of the Ripper murders. The evidence that Silver was in Whitechapel at the time of the Ripper murders includes the birth of his daughter there, van Onselen said.

As pimp and brothel keeper, Silver would have been familiar with the prostitutes working in the area, van Onselen said.

Silver, who was born in Poland, arrived in Johannesburg in 1898 fresh from a stint in Sing Sing for burglary and a stay in London a decade earlier. Shortly after arriving in Johannesburg, Silver set up a string of cafes, cigar shops and police-protected brothels.

Silver was litigious, wrote bold letters to newspapers and had an array of mocking aliases, van Onselen said. Jack the Ripper is believed to have taunted police with brazen letters to the papers.

Van Onselen, the son of a detective, tracked Silver across Africa, the Americas and Europe, "staggered by how mobile this guy was." In the end, Silver was executed as a spy in Poland in 1918.

Van Onselen points to similarities between the subject of his book and the Whitechapel murderer, both psychopaths with a deep hatred of women. Silver had bitter, violent relationships with women all his life.

"In terms of a template for this person, in terms of age, personality, mental illness, pattern for rest of life, this is the best fit there has ever been," he said.

I apologize if it's already been said, but I've not enought time at present to read through all the responses. I shall certainly try to when time allows though.

I have always held to the chick theory. A midwife who worked and worked to make a living and sees these people out there being paid for such things. Midwifes and the like would have a completely logical excuse to have blood on them, and as women would not likely be questioned. There would also be some level of surgical knowledge and anatomical comfort. Also, in such a situation as there was at the time, a woman would generally feel safe going off with another woman and not question their decision until it was too late.

When I worked in the nursing home of the VA hospital, I was single and had my maiden name Kelly, I worked with Pat Chapman,and Anne Nichols....we thought it was freaky to have three of the Ripper victim names on one ward. ~Shelley

What is this ghost shadow that brushes my shoulder?
The night wind whispers and I must follow. Long is the shadow cast by the black wings of fear.

I've always been interested in Jack the Ripper. What the article said made sense. But, so does other theories on the Ripper being one person who "escalated"his killings based upon possibly feeling like he could get away with anything, or perhaps the pleasure he received from one kill needed to be worse on the next kill to derive the same pleasure.

I have no idea who he was, or if there were more than one killer. It's sort of like Kennedy, will we ever find out who really killed him.

Hm, What Dr. Nini claims sounds pretty bogus to me. While I do see the potential of forensic linguistics, I highly doubt that there is enough material for a comparative analysis in a short letter and a postcard to draw any sort of conclusion from. Just my two cents.